1. Objectifs

Intentions :
«This chapter is first about Canadian women who have come to develop, through their embodied experience of place, an intimate connection to a specific locality in what is often called the Global South. Then, it is an attempt to reflect on that transnational connection and the multiple and contradicting ways it shaped identity transmission processes when these women became mothers to ’mixed’ children and raised them in Canada. It aims at questioning articulations between place, intimacy and identity transmission in the context of increased transnational mobility for young women of reproductive age.» (p. 69-70)

2. Méthode

Échantillon/Matériau :
«The discussion stems from a broader ethnographic project conducted between 2015 and 2017 in which [the author] examined Canadian women’s intimate relationships with men from the Global South and their experience of the Canadian spousal reunification process. […] For the purpose of this chapter, [the author zooms] in on the narratives of 17 women who had children at the time of the interview. The women were met and interviewed in Canada after they had moved back from their stay(s) in a country of the Global South.» (p. 73) The majority of participants live in Québec.

Instruments :
Guide d’entretien

Type de traitement des données :
Analyse de contenu

3. Résumé

According to the author, «[t]he trajectories of Canadian women who became mothers of ’mixed’ children were diverse and their children were never mere copies of their identification with a locality of the Global South, however transformative their experience of place and their transnational longings were. The women’s narratives are complex tales in which their love of a place, their love of a man, sexual intimacy and other intense sensory experiences shaped their conception of self, their sense of belonging and their understanding of cultural authenticity in Canada and abroad. […] The women’s personal and embodied trajectories of mobility and attachment also structured the strategies (or lack thereof) of identity transmission they developed. Their cultural ideals were sometimes projected onto their children’s actions and ways of carrying themselves, while at other times, they marked them in more durable ways, for example, through the names they bore. The food they ate, the languages spoken, and their travels were all significant sites where mothers’ attachment to the ‘out-of-the-way place’ was transmitted to their children in the Canadian context, although not always in straightforward ways.» (p. 83)